By Jenny Allen
The domestic diva opens up about the pain in her past, the love in her life, and how she bounced back big time.
Martha Stewart takes a forkful of lemon pie and savors it. "Isn't this good?" she asks in that trademark low, plummy voice.
We're lunching in her office at the Manhattan TV studio where she's just finished hosting a live broadcast of The Martha Stewart Show, her Emmy award-winning daily program. She sits at one end of the sleek rectangular table that serves as her desk, having closed and set aside the silver laptop — with its Martha-blue mouse — on which she'd been answering some of the 55 e-mails she's already gotten today. (The Martha Stewart no-nonsense approach to e-mail: "If it's important, I answer it. If it's not, I don't.") Still dressed in the beige slacks, crisp white shirt, and thin navy-blue pullover she wore on the show, she looks fresh and rested even though she's been up since dawn and sleeps just a few hours a night. Her only jewelry is a pair of sparkly aquamarine earrings; her nails are kept short, as befits a gardener and cook.
We've dined on perfectly steamed halibut and a salad of mixed greens with hearts of palm, prepared by her TV test-kitchen staff. Stewart made our dessert on the air earlier today with her guest Cheryl Hines, the actress who plays Larry David's wife on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hines is not a cook. ("You know how to use a knife, right?" Stewart cracked after Hines told her she never makes dinner and has never used her food processor.) So Stewart supplied a traditional Shaker pie recipe, throwing in a few details about the dwindling, simplicity-loving Protestant sect whose sense of design she so admires. "I love dessert," she says cheerfully. "I can't be guilty about it because I have to taste everything. I experiment." I ask her if she ever goes on a diet. "Oh, all the time," she says. "Some days I just don't eat." Why? "So I can zip my pants up," she says with a little laugh.
It's a wonderful pie, a pastel-yellow ode to refined sugar with lots of tangy lemon zest in it. I tell Stewart I love that. "It has the real peel," she says with pleasure. As everyone in our solar system knows, these things matter to Stewart — the real peel, not just a squirt from a bottle; the telling touches and careful choices that make a pie or a house or a life that much better. Still, I'm fascinated to see for myself how deeply she cares about the details, to witness what she calls her "enthusiasm for everyday things." It's what gives her the authenticity that her fans love, what more than makes up for a manner that, as has been noted, can be bossy sometimes.
During our talk, Stewart is poised and in control, sitting with perfect posture in her office chair, never fidgeting. But there's nothing stiff about her. At 66, she's straightforward, occasionally blunt, often wry, with humor in her brown eyes and a youthfulness that may be in part a genetic blessing — she's always had terrific, glowing skin — but also comes from attitude, a buoyancy that has seen her through a spectacular public disgrace.
Some people might have banished themselves to a humiliated early retirement. But in the two and a half years since her release from Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, where she spent five months for making false statements to government investigators about her role in the ImClone insider trading scandal, Stewart has jump-started her stalled company and moved forward full-throttle into a rich, packed, larger-than-life life. "I was ready to go the moment I stepped out of Alderson," she says. No momentary dip in self-confidence? No fleeting panic? "I've always been fearless," she says, and you believe her.
After prison came more than five months of house arrest at her 153-acre estate in Bedford, NY, during which Stewart wore an electronic ankle bracelet. By the end of the ordeal, she'd resigned as chairman and CEO of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (traded as MSO on the New York Stock Exchange), and — when MSO stock took a nosedive — lost hundreds of millions of dollars of her personal fortune. Her first TV show was canceled, and her face disappeared from the pages of Martha Stewart Living, the magazine she'd founded. "I will be back," she said, famously, standing on the courthouse steps just after being sentenced in July 2004.
Is she ever. Stewart has rebounded to a degree that perhaps only her fiercest fans believed she would. True, MSO reportedly hasn't turned an annual profit since 2002, the year her name was first publicly linked to the securities fraud investigation. Her version of The Apprentice, which aired six months after she was sprung from home confinement, failed after only 13 weeks on the air. And The Martha Stewart Show hasn't had stellar ratings. But it's been renewed for another year, and this spring earned five more Emmy nominations. MSO stock has held its own, and Stewart is still the driving force in the expanding company, though now her title is founder, not CEO. The number of advertising pages in Martha Stewart Living is climbing, and Stewart is a presence in the magazine once again, photographed squeezing a pastry tube and hanging framed maps on a wall in her Maine vacation home. Fans can listen all day to her Sirius satellite radio channel, read Blueprint (her new magazine for younger nesters), and find the answer to every conceivable domestic question in Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook, an encyclopedic 744-page guide published last year.
They can even move into Martha Stewart houses, built in partnership with KB Home; 10 developments will be finished by the end of the year in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Reasonably priced, the homes are inspired by Stewart's places in Maine, East Hampton, and Bedford. If they like, the owners can paint those houses with Martha Stewart Colors (available at Lowe's), lay down Martha Stewart carpet tiles or area rugs, and preserve their memories with a new line of scrapbooking supplies, unveiled on her show this very day and available, she reminds her viewers more than once, at Michaels crafts stores around the country. Beginning next year, they can even tuck into a Martha meal, from an array of fresh, refrigerated, and frozen foods to be sold at Costco. Her current high-visibility venture, launching in September, is an upscale line of home products — kitchenware, dishes, bed linens, towels, and holiday ornaments — to be sold exclusively at Macy's stores. The announcement of the partnership reportedly sent MSO stock up nearly 12 percent.
Stewart credits colleagues and employees — "so many people who stuck by me" — with steering her enterprise back on course. But the case could be made that her hard-charging ambition and utter commitment to her company are most responsible for MSO's revival. When she shows me some of the Macy's items, she talks about them with genuine excitement. "Look at that beautiful, delicate rim," she says, holding up a porcelain plate, then presenting the scalloped-edge sheets, the glassware ("Polish crystal, which I love"), and a reproduction antique spice rack ("This was an old tobacco sorter that I discovered at an antiques show probably 30 years ago"). She rubs a bath towel between her thumb and forefinger. "Feel that nice quality," she says.
It's natural to wonder whether this display of delight is only a form of salesmanship. But Stewart is never just pushing product. She loves these items and the life they represent. For her, work and play are one. She takes deep pleasure in all those Martha things that show up on her calendar — spring-cleaning the canary cages, moving her citrus plants outdoors for the summer. And she can sound like a precocious child when she proudly lists all the activities in her chockablock weekend.
Saturday morning, she tells me, she relocated her bees. "I have three hives. We're building a new greenhouse and I don't want to disrupt their pollinating. So I got dressed up in my bee outfit, cleaned the hives, and moved them up by the vegetable garden." Then she went to see an "amazing" stand of maples at a friend's house, after which she came home and oversaw the planting of some trees of her own. "Oh, and I drove!" she remembers. "I drove my carriage for an hour in the afternoon." She means one of the three turn-of-the-century horse-drawn vehicles she expertly guides down the lanes of her Bedford estate. Somewhere in there she took a lesson on a fancy new sewing machine from SVP Worldwide, whose Singer, Pfaff, and Husqvarna Viking brands she endorses. It's one of five machines, including her 1961 Singer, that she keeps in her new third-floor crafts room, which, she tells her TV audience, she has taken to organizing at 11 o'clock at night.
The domestic diva opens up about the pain in her past, the love in her life, and how she bounced back big time.
Martha Stewart takes a forkful of lemon pie and savors it. "Isn't this good?" she asks in that trademark low, plummy voice.
We're lunching in her office at the Manhattan TV studio where she's just finished hosting a live broadcast of The Martha Stewart Show, her Emmy award-winning daily program. She sits at one end of the sleek rectangular table that serves as her desk, having closed and set aside the silver laptop — with its Martha-blue mouse — on which she'd been answering some of the 55 e-mails she's already gotten today. (The Martha Stewart no-nonsense approach to e-mail: "If it's important, I answer it. If it's not, I don't.") Still dressed in the beige slacks, crisp white shirt, and thin navy-blue pullover she wore on the show, she looks fresh and rested even though she's been up since dawn and sleeps just a few hours a night. Her only jewelry is a pair of sparkly aquamarine earrings; her nails are kept short, as befits a gardener and cook.
We've dined on perfectly steamed halibut and a salad of mixed greens with hearts of palm, prepared by her TV test-kitchen staff. Stewart made our dessert on the air earlier today with her guest Cheryl Hines, the actress who plays Larry David's wife on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hines is not a cook. ("You know how to use a knife, right?" Stewart cracked after Hines told her she never makes dinner and has never used her food processor.) So Stewart supplied a traditional Shaker pie recipe, throwing in a few details about the dwindling, simplicity-loving Protestant sect whose sense of design she so admires. "I love dessert," she says cheerfully. "I can't be guilty about it because I have to taste everything. I experiment." I ask her if she ever goes on a diet. "Oh, all the time," she says. "Some days I just don't eat." Why? "So I can zip my pants up," she says with a little laugh.
It's a wonderful pie, a pastel-yellow ode to refined sugar with lots of tangy lemon zest in it. I tell Stewart I love that. "It has the real peel," she says with pleasure. As everyone in our solar system knows, these things matter to Stewart — the real peel, not just a squirt from a bottle; the telling touches and careful choices that make a pie or a house or a life that much better. Still, I'm fascinated to see for myself how deeply she cares about the details, to witness what she calls her "enthusiasm for everyday things." It's what gives her the authenticity that her fans love, what more than makes up for a manner that, as has been noted, can be bossy sometimes.
During our talk, Stewart is poised and in control, sitting with perfect posture in her office chair, never fidgeting. But there's nothing stiff about her. At 66, she's straightforward, occasionally blunt, often wry, with humor in her brown eyes and a youthfulness that may be in part a genetic blessing — she's always had terrific, glowing skin — but also comes from attitude, a buoyancy that has seen her through a spectacular public disgrace.
Some people might have banished themselves to a humiliated early retirement. But in the two and a half years since her release from Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, where she spent five months for making false statements to government investigators about her role in the ImClone insider trading scandal, Stewart has jump-started her stalled company and moved forward full-throttle into a rich, packed, larger-than-life life. "I was ready to go the moment I stepped out of Alderson," she says. No momentary dip in self-confidence? No fleeting panic? "I've always been fearless," she says, and you believe her.
After prison came more than five months of house arrest at her 153-acre estate in Bedford, NY, during which Stewart wore an electronic ankle bracelet. By the end of the ordeal, she'd resigned as chairman and CEO of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (traded as MSO on the New York Stock Exchange), and — when MSO stock took a nosedive — lost hundreds of millions of dollars of her personal fortune. Her first TV show was canceled, and her face disappeared from the pages of Martha Stewart Living, the magazine she'd founded. "I will be back," she said, famously, standing on the courthouse steps just after being sentenced in July 2004.
Is she ever. Stewart has rebounded to a degree that perhaps only her fiercest fans believed she would. True, MSO reportedly hasn't turned an annual profit since 2002, the year her name was first publicly linked to the securities fraud investigation. Her version of The Apprentice, which aired six months after she was sprung from home confinement, failed after only 13 weeks on the air. And The Martha Stewart Show hasn't had stellar ratings. But it's been renewed for another year, and this spring earned five more Emmy nominations. MSO stock has held its own, and Stewart is still the driving force in the expanding company, though now her title is founder, not CEO. The number of advertising pages in Martha Stewart Living is climbing, and Stewart is a presence in the magazine once again, photographed squeezing a pastry tube and hanging framed maps on a wall in her Maine vacation home. Fans can listen all day to her Sirius satellite radio channel, read Blueprint (her new magazine for younger nesters), and find the answer to every conceivable domestic question in Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook, an encyclopedic 744-page guide published last year.
They can even move into Martha Stewart houses, built in partnership with KB Home; 10 developments will be finished by the end of the year in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Reasonably priced, the homes are inspired by Stewart's places in Maine, East Hampton, and Bedford. If they like, the owners can paint those houses with Martha Stewart Colors (available at Lowe's), lay down Martha Stewart carpet tiles or area rugs, and preserve their memories with a new line of scrapbooking supplies, unveiled on her show this very day and available, she reminds her viewers more than once, at Michaels crafts stores around the country. Beginning next year, they can even tuck into a Martha meal, from an array of fresh, refrigerated, and frozen foods to be sold at Costco. Her current high-visibility venture, launching in September, is an upscale line of home products — kitchenware, dishes, bed linens, towels, and holiday ornaments — to be sold exclusively at Macy's stores. The announcement of the partnership reportedly sent MSO stock up nearly 12 percent.
Stewart credits colleagues and employees — "so many people who stuck by me" — with steering her enterprise back on course. But the case could be made that her hard-charging ambition and utter commitment to her company are most responsible for MSO's revival. When she shows me some of the Macy's items, she talks about them with genuine excitement. "Look at that beautiful, delicate rim," she says, holding up a porcelain plate, then presenting the scalloped-edge sheets, the glassware ("Polish crystal, which I love"), and a reproduction antique spice rack ("This was an old tobacco sorter that I discovered at an antiques show probably 30 years ago"). She rubs a bath towel between her thumb and forefinger. "Feel that nice quality," she says.
It's natural to wonder whether this display of delight is only a form of salesmanship. But Stewart is never just pushing product. She loves these items and the life they represent. For her, work and play are one. She takes deep pleasure in all those Martha things that show up on her calendar — spring-cleaning the canary cages, moving her citrus plants outdoors for the summer. And she can sound like a precocious child when she proudly lists all the activities in her chockablock weekend.
Saturday morning, she tells me, she relocated her bees. "I have three hives. We're building a new greenhouse and I don't want to disrupt their pollinating. So I got dressed up in my bee outfit, cleaned the hives, and moved them up by the vegetable garden." Then she went to see an "amazing" stand of maples at a friend's house, after which she came home and oversaw the planting of some trees of her own. "Oh, and I drove!" she remembers. "I drove my carriage for an hour in the afternoon." She means one of the three turn-of-the-century horse-drawn vehicles she expertly guides down the lanes of her Bedford estate. Somewhere in there she took a lesson on a fancy new sewing machine from SVP Worldwide, whose Singer, Pfaff, and Husqvarna Viking brands she endorses. It's one of five machines, including her 1961 Singer, that she keeps in her new third-floor crafts room, which, she tells her TV audience, she has taken to organizing at 11 o'clock at night.
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